The church gave me two months severance pay, and let us stay in the parsonage for two months. I had been looking for a new job, but in complete honesty good church jobs are hard to find. I had an interview at a church in Indiana the week after I preached my final sermon, but after meeting with their church board I knew it wasn't something I wanted to take. I had one more interview at a church in West Virginia, but this also wasn't a situation I wanted to get into. I even looked at getting back into youth ministry a couple times, but those doors didn't open up.
I did a little pulpit supply (filling in for a pastor who is out one Sunday), but no where near as much as I was hoping. I was frustrated. A couple older pastors on the district asked to meet with me, wanting to talk and offer their guidance from experience. They were people who had encouraged me up to this point, so I gladly met with them. Unfortunately, the meetings turned into, "Here's everything you did wrong". I was already down, and now I was getting kicked.
This whole experience made me guarded, angry, and bitter. There were very few people I wanted to talk to about my experience because didn't feel like getting kicked anymore. I was already feeling like a failure, I was always told how gifted I was, one of my professors had said about me "He's the top pastoral candidate to come out of this school in a long time." One professor told me at the end of my junior year that I already preached better than 90% of pastors in the denomination, and to be completely honest, I didn't let this stuff go to my head, I was past that stage of life and immaturity, and instead saw it as the encouragement of trusted men. I now look at those things as areas to continue to grow.
I was angry with the people I had been trying to lead and pastor, particularly the lady who worked so hard against me. I was angry with a lot of people, I felt that I had been put in a dying church, and no one would help. Other pastors had asked, "How can I help? What do you need?" When I finally figured it out and told them, the requests were ignored. I felt abandoned and expected to work a miracle, and when that didn't happen, I felt cast and forgotten about.
I slowly became bitter. For years I blamed so many other people. I held onto feelings of resentment towards the pastors who talked to me afterwards, towards the people in the church I had tried to lead, and towards the district superintendents. Whenever any one of these people would reach out to me with phone call, text message, or Facebook, I'd ignore it. All of this really began to eat at me.
So what is a young, 25 year old to do in this situation? Well, a more mature individual would have taken the opportunity for personal examination. I internalized everything, shut a lot of people out, and ended up walking away from professional church ministry. I gave up looking for jobs in churches, I didn't want to talk with anyone who had hurt me, didn't want to think about most of them, and to be honest, I got a little frustrated with God. He had sent me to this church, He hadn't answered my prayers for this church or my ministry there in the community, and now He wouldn't open the door for me to do professional ministry.
This wound shaped a lot of my life from that point on. For years it went ignored, but God never forgot about it...
Fight the lion, 1 Peter 5.1-11
TO GOD ALONE BE THE GLORY!
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